The biggest problem. Trolls!

Hello there,

I have a favour to ask you: Could you describe as detailed as possible what exactly this problematic behavior is? Assume you have to explain it to someone who has no idea what you are talking about.

Hear Me Roar wrote:

There must be strict sanctions for this!

I'm afraid it's not that easy. First of all, punishments are not every effective way to shape behavior in general. They have some use of course, but rewards generally work way better.
The second problem is that, contrary to the common opinion and intuitive logic, strict punishments are actually not more effective than soft ones. The opposite is true. Scaling up punishments until the unwanted behavior is gone generally doesn't work.

But even with knowing that it's still not simple. The most important thing is to understand where the behavior is coming from and trying to do something against the causes for this behavior instead of fighting the behavior directly.

That's why I asked you to provide some details about the behavior you consider problematic. Understanding the behavior is the first and necessary step.

PS: In case you wonder why I comment on this although I am usually mostly active behind the scenes....Player Behavior is sort of my area of expertise and a topic I am generally interested in, both at work and in my free time.

I absolutely agree with pretty much everything you wrote.

The main problem I see is the challenge to identify the "real trolls" (i.e. those who ruin the game on purpose and with sadist motivation) reliably and not mix them up with players who do it by accident or due to lack of knowledge.

I was new to the game not too long ago and, for example, I stole majorities, since I didn't know better. I had no idea that this is all organized and that there are unwritten rules not to do that.

Obviously players like that should not be punished.

So the crucial part is to notice the difference....reliably. This is a problem that doesn't just exist in Rail Nation, but in many games. Intentionally ruining the game is very hard to identify and prove, especially if you want to avoid punishing innocent players...which, obviously, you should avoid.

Do you think there would be a reliable way to identify the trolls in Rail Nation?

This is a very nice thread, which should make everyone think ... and I am happy that HearMeRoar met Salix here.

Let me make an example:

Someone takes the majority somewhere.

The problem is: that is totally with the game rules. Like in combat games you are allowed to shoot other players, the RN rules do not disallowed to take the majority of any of the goods or any of the factories on the map.

So, if player A takes a majority

- he achieves a better time for his trains, he can deliver more, that increases his income

- he gets more points (PP)

- it might give him an advantage to win a competition, imagine you can win the bonus machine and all competitors are in associaton X ... taking the majorty from X will make you the winner of the machine

--> those are 3 examples, how A can have much more game fun, without breaking any game rule

However, player B might have less fun from that action of A

- taking the majority from X will make up to 25 members of X suffer from more waiting time

- B gets less points

- B and other members of X will lose the competition for the bonus machine

- the lost majority might destroy any team strategy of the region team, the team in that city, befriended associations ...

So, A did interfere with an action that is totally with the game rules.

Problem is, if he did that on purpose to annoy many other players ... if he has fun in destroying other people's fun, that would be a punishable action ... but how can you tell? Only very few will brag about their action, they sit at home laughing loudly when reading the reactions of the others, and how they escalate to insults ...

For Salix:

There is some contradiction in the messages we get .... when RN tells the objectives of the game, they tell: be the best, take more PP thann others, be the winner ... we hear that for both: single players' objectives and association objectives. So, if we read that, RN sounds like a zero sum game. There can only be one winner.

On the other hand starting screens, blogs etc. tell us: This is a team game, be a team leader.

Marketing actions of RN praise the team spirit ... because there are associations, because the end game will always be team action ...

... but at the end ... well, I am talking of the German section now ... if a new round is announced, only the winners of the zero sum game are announced and celebrated, the team of the city that won the end game is not even mentioned.

The winners are celebrated, but not the team efforts shown in that round.

This contradiction, RN being a combat game that you can only win by making more points than all others, taking more majorities, winning more competitions, investing in more (German: Wartezeithalbierungen) in more cities, being on rank 1 on most goods to be delivered ... and on the other hand the game would not be playable without teams, forming associations, city teams, region teams, motivate to a cooperative strategy, acting together to win the end game ... this contradiction causes a lot of misunderstandings.

A player motivated by winning (zero sum game) will be annoyed by team actions and agreements of teams (like about majorities) ... on the other hand team orientated players will be annoyed by the winners who have to "interfere" to get the points they need. These contraticting objectives of the game, which also are an essential part of the game, cause a lot of angry discussions, that often escalate to insults.

In my experience on game worlds (my experience as dev and admin is 90% in virtual worlds, not browser games) there is one simple way to avoid escalation of diskusstions and insults: be there ... just the creator, owner, publisher of the game being present often stops insults, escalations, unfair interferences. If you are present, you can talk to those, who act to escalate the situation.

Over the decates I experienced the power of moderators who do nothing but being there, making known they are there. And also, if players are arguing or even insulting each other ... even if I just appear, known as one of the devs/creators, they immediately stop the insults and try to talk to me, tell me now much they love the game, and tell be about bugs, directly, so I immediately know about the problems.

Being there, being present, means to get some moderators, so it's a problem of "human resources". But also: in my experience the employees of the game owner should be there.

Managers often thin, a programmer will be better, if he writes code 8 hours a day. Well, let him play the game 2 hours each day, he will write much better (and more) code in the remaining 6 hours, he will know about the humans that play his game, their problems, their wishes ... and being there, being present, he will get to know what causes the interferences ... and how they can be overcome by some coding.

There will always be interferences, some caused by misunderstandings or by competing strategies ... but also many caused by people that only have fun, if they destroy the fun of others.

However: you must be there to know, how it happened, to judge if the action is taken by a killjoy or a good player ... no ticket system, no support, will ever be possible ... the written complaints about rule breaking or interferences will never allow fair judgement. You must be there, there must be a reliable witness.

Salix, you will tell me: no way! We cannot be there 24/7 on all server in all countries.

Yes, that's true. But today, everyone knows: you are there 0/0 on 0 servers. And that makes it so easy to interfere and if there is a complaint to tell: "It's all with the game rules"

No need to be there 24/7 on all servers ... but to show up a few times ... would stop 80+% of all interferences.

Quote

you are there 0/0 on 0 servers

That's actually not correct. We just finished a round where 20-25 of us participated.

Actually, I disagree with you on the majority logs :

- if someone invested 3 millions in an industry, and I cannot take 5th spot without breaking with just a 60k investment. I will break the majority. Every single time. Am I responsible ? I don't think so, or at least not fully.

Will the game be better ? I don't know. For me it sure won't be, since I probably break 50-100 majorities / day in 6th era (yeah, nobody invests, it's a shame...). So I think you can guess how my messaging system will look like : "Insert random insult x10" x 20 messages...

Also, the logs don't solve everything, especially in EG. often, the break in EG is the sum of the 15 players investing at the same time. To blame 1 would be ridiculous.

For the majority break thing. Why not, but an option that can be ignored once for the whole game please. I don't have the time to confirm x times / day that I really want to break a majority for X or Y reason, I want to be able to do it without confirming it, as is the case now.

Salix wrote:

That's actually not correct. We just finished a round where 20-25 of us participated.

Well, I wrote: " But today, everyone knows: you are there 0/0 on 0 servers."

Even if the subclause is totally incorrect, the main clause (ev1 knows) can be correct.

Now, if you talk about first round of Broadway, I think there were even more.

But if you talk about a different round/server ... who did know?

When I suggest to be present, I really talk about someone being visibly present from time to time, so players know, there might be a witness of the game owner who might report to support. My experience is, that just 1-3 showing up now and then will stop escalations of fights almost completely.

I like the idea of showing who broke or took majoritys....

if there is a good reason like sacroima claimed, u can still argue to the previous majority owner.

Hear Me Roar wrote:

3) Broken Majority Counter. (This proposal makes sense once the number 2 is realized)

Make a counter for the broken majority for each player.

It must be easily visible to every player in the game.

Visible for players to keep a log. Every player when and where broke a majority.

I don't think public shaming is an good idea.

TLDR; I like the OP's Idea but it should be used only as a way to help new prevent players from getting squashed by trolls.

So I would like to tell a little story.

One day I decided to play rail-nation. All green and excited and not knowing any better I joined a classic server late game in the suggested city, so had a fairly uninhabited playground to learn the mechanics and what not. I also learned you could join multiple servers, oh hey this one is a map of the US and 100 gold for joining Miami? Yes Please!. Suddenly the classic game ended and my server was gone!... Oh I learned this game has a resetting map. ok cool. I look for a new server to join with a lot of time left. What is this Steam Over Europe? it looks like an expansion pack or sequel of some kind. Lets try that! Long story short, In SoE I run into a Troll/Bully, whatever you want to call it, who is what I would say was a fairly decent player, with a dark twisted agenda. Constantly taking majorities in our cities RG's and setting us rivals, and even when we would give up on our city and start running to the neighbors city or a landmark, he would figure out where the bulk of our association of mostly NEWBs was running and take those majorities. Keep in mind he never hauled from any of these broken majorities....he just liked picking on new guys. When we tried to bring his abhorrent behavior to the attention of his team mates or others on the server we were told..."It's a financial warfare game, make money and hurt him back" or "So move somewhere else". This went on for several Era's before I all but gave up and kept it alive until EG and then spent 12 rounds or so avoiding SoE and playing US maps solely, almost quitting RN altogether.

Ok, What was the point of my story? No it wasn't to cry poor me. It was to point out that these trolls do clearly exist in the game and they help form the opinions of new players. I agree that there is no real way to clearly identify and create a process to prevent this.... HOWEVER; A clear rule against bullying, and or purpose disrupting another persons gameplay for no goal other than being annoying could give the staff a little bit of firepower, so that IF at the time I had known enough to contact support, they could have looked at game logs to verify, and reached out to the arse in question and said "knock it off or get a 3 day ban from the server". There should also be a similar punishment for filing false bullying claims, to prevent two experienced players form using it as a weapon in their war for control of an area.

There will never be a feature in Rail Nation, that makes it easy to start a blame game over majorities. It's not easy to tell who to 'blame' + there's nothing wrong in breaking the majority and gathering all the prestige you can get as a solo player. These shame / blame game tools would turn the game into something completely else...

There are votes for mayor or president. There can be also votes for players to limitate to take majority or invest in city's industries.

For example:

- Every player based in city for more than 50% of time of the game can propose a person to give a limitation, and every such person can vote

- If proposed player gets vote to be banned by 33+% of players from city, who fulfil the previously stated requirement, proposed player cannot take personal majority in any industry in the city as long as there is this number of votes

- If proposed player gets vote to be banned by 50+% of players from the city, as stated above, he cannot invest in any industry in the city for more than 3 clicks

- Number of proposed players that You can vote for limitation could be as a try limited to 2 for eras 1 and 2, 4 for eras 3 and 4, 6 for eras 5 and 6, 8 for end game

So it would work with really pissing of guys, when big part of city would cooperate to limit their overinvesting activity

If such function is implemented is kind of automated and does not involve any moderators, admins or company workers to spend time on checking claims to ban whoever. Using mechanism similar to voting, which is already in-game, should be not that hard to develop it. Percentages and number of votes need some testing of course, to keep the numbers possible to use but not so easy to overuse just cause of disliking someone.

This mechanism might work also for guys who spam and do other bad stuff, as city community might use it to some way 'punish' such a player and hopefully clear RN community of such attitudes in long term for the enjoyment of most (except the trolls themselves )

What you are offering here in real life is called totalitarianism. Who gave you the right to decide who to play and who not? If someone has other views, different from yours, can he be accused of hereticism and burned at the stake? Where does such a passion for eugenics come from?

Explain to me how one person can bring down the majority of 26? Well, once he gave for this his entire daily turnover, production in an hour moved to a new level and all his efforts went down the drain. If he does it again tomorrow, he will simply lose the pace of the game and will not be able to earn money further. If he knocks down most of you with only 2-3 investments, then you need to be kicked out of the game, that you did not interfere with playing normal people who really want to play, and not just appear in the game 1-2 times a day. If, after the transfer of production to a new level, 10-15 people make 1-2 investments each, no one will ever take this majority in small amounts.

What is the main goal of the game? Gain the most prestige. In what ways people aspiring to this will do you should not worry if all the capitalization rules are followed carefully, such as multi-accounts, password exchange and so on.

If only one person can interfere with your team, then you simply have no team. And you are not able to play, simply ask the developers dope. Communicate with those who bother you, in 90% this will give the result. This is a social multiplayer game and the ability to negotiate in it is one of the components of success. If not much more important and influencing the result than simply changing the routes of steam locomotives from time to time. If you cannot do this, then no prisons or genocide will help you.

If you are so easily brought to tears, play OpenTDD only with trusted friends. But do not spoil this game.

A lot of interesting stuff here, I apologize in advance for the lengthy post.

Hear Me Roar wrote:

Perhaps one of the most elegant solutions is AI.

I tend to agree. It's is foreseeable that this is the imminent future, but we are not quite there yet. The biggest problem right now is rather boring: It's expensive. AI is interesting for extremely big communities (for example Facebook would need ~200.000 payed moderators if they wouldn't use AI), but for smaller communities it's not worth it...yet. I expect this to change in the next few years, especially because there are a few companies that compete with each other right now, which will hopefully drive development and reduce costs.

Hear Me Roar wrote:

1) Troll Prohibition

Above all, this behavior should be forbidden (Troll).

And let everyone know there are sanctions for offenders.

Trolls want attention. Making a big fuzz about trolls and threatening them with punishments tends to increase the problem instead of reducing it. Trolls are a rather unique problem because, in a way, they want to be punished, since punishment is a form of attention. Even today the best weapon against trolls is still to ignore them. "Don't feed the troll" is probably the wisest of all internet wisdom and it's actually backed up scientifically.

Hear Me Roar wrote:

Broken Majority Log and Counter

Interesting idea. Probably not as easy to do as it sounds, but might be worth to check how much effort it would be to do something like that. I'll look into it.

Hear Me Roar wrote:

Allow each player to choose another player and declare "Probable troll"

So basically a report function in the game. To be honest, I don't think this is necessary. Overall, the Rail Nation community is incredibly reasonable and peaceful, if you compare it to other games. While disruptive behvaior exists in RN too of coures, it's not generally a major problem if you compare it other problems (like everyones darling, performance). It doesn't really justify the development of an entire new system in the game, especially if it's partly redundant to what the customer support can already do. Keep in mind that working on A always means that you are not working on B. While a report feature is probably not a bad idea, there are simple other things that have higher priority.

Hear Me Roar wrote:

The list of possible trolls must be visible to all players on the server.

On this one I strongly disagree and I agree with hilti2 . There is a reason why pillories have not been used anymore since the dark ages. The goal of all punishment is to change the behavior of the punished person. Public shaming doesn't do that, for several reasons. Firstly, due to its cruelty, it destroys the relation between punished and punisher. Punishments are most effective if they are accepted by the punished and if a punishment is considered too harsh or unfair, it can have the opposite effect and lead to deviant behavior to distance yourself from the punisher. Secondly, public shaming ruins your reputation. And if your reputation is already ruined, why even bother to change? It's easier to just enjoy your new role as villain/outcast.

And, last but not least: The deterrence effect is usually overestimated. Fear of punishment does not work as well as one would intuitively think it does.

Hear Me Roar wrote:

Many trolls will deny such actions or reduce them considerably.

Just because they know they're being watched.

Not for actual trolls. They would love it, they feed of attention.

Hear Me Roar wrote:

5) You play with us (and secret police).

I think the advice you play with us is very good. (For the reasons given above comment)

But to have a deterrent effect it must be visible.

As mentioned before, the deterrence effect is not as strong as one would think. In addition, actual trolls can also be encouraged by the presence of "authorities", because mocking and harassing authority is even more fun for them than just harassing anyone.

Hear Me Roar wrote:

6) Observers

There are a few other games that tried that and it's not inherently a bad ide (in fact it worked quite well), but it comes along with a surprisingly big amount of work to keep it running, mostly due the "Who watches the watchers?" problem. Similar to AI, this is a method that is viable for massively big communities that have a huge problem with disruptive behavior.
But in general I am a big fan of using this method and creating systems that allow a community to govern themselves. I'll keep it in mind.

Klabbauter wrote:

Even if the subclause is totally incorrect, the main clause (ev1 knows) can be correct

True. Perception matters, of course.

_____
Nerisrath That's a valuable insight, thank you.
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Seroslav wrote:

If such function is implemented is kind of automated and does not involve any moderators, admins or company workers to spend time on checking claims to ban whoever. Using mechanism similar to voting, which is already in-game, should be not that hard to develop it.

I can guarantee you, if I would go to our developers and suggest this, they would strongly disagree that this is not hard to develop
It always looks easier from the outside and new features can be A LOT of work if they were not intended from the start.
But I also think that your general approach to the problem is a good one. The best way to fight disruptive behavior is not to set up strict rules, punish bad behavior or reward good behavior. The game itself should encourage good behavior by design and not even allow bad behavior...if it's possible to do that. Strongly depends on the game and the game mechanic of course.

You think about the word "majority". Who gave the most money and owns the majority. Why the majority should be in those who do not invest in it? You can ease the task of programmers. Generally remove the investment. And then everything will be fair. What association has the most people connected to this enterprise for that and the majority. Is that right for you? Why do you want to penalize only for violating the majority, but not to penalize for the fact that the association does not monitor its operations. The game has a huge gray mass that comes into the game only for repair and construction 1-2 times a day. Is this the target audience according to the developers? Or those who really play and are in the game for every recalculation of production? Why do they have to wait for someone, who would come down to invest in their own business? Why does a person who spends his time and maybe money for a game should get into some sort of lists, just because the one who has the majority, laziness comes into the game?

How are you going to determine who is to blame? The man who made 10 investments and took the first line in a foreign enterprise, without violating the majority. Or did the one who came after him and with one investment broke that most? Or even indiscriminately in general all in the black list?